NISO Awarded IMLS Grant for Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project | August 02, 2022

"The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation (PALCI), and Lehigh University Libraries, along with 27 other partner organizations, have been awarded a National Leadership Grant for Libraries by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for a Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP). The CCLP will create a suite of best practices, improve standards, and prototype middleware infrastructure for the development and management of cooperative collections development. It aims to enable the efficient acquisition of collections and the sharing of those collections, along with related services, by developing a framework that libraries and consortia can use to share expertise, data, and collections to efficiently steward limited resources in serving library patrons. Networks of libraries have a long tradition of working together to expand their resources and provide more complete coverage through sharing of resources. A variety of models have been developed over the years and, more recently, larger networks of institutions have explored wider adoption of cooperative collections management. However, a number of infrastructure barriers to wider implementation remain, which CCLP seeks to address; they include a lack of interoperable systems and data exchange, governance and decision-making frameworks, and measurement and assessment tools. Improving this strategic infrastructure will particularly benefit libraries and their constituencies with historically underrepresented and underserved communities, as well as those with less-resourced collections budgets. It will enable a greater degree of collaboration, empowerment, and access to shared and unique local resources. CCLP’s deliverables include: convening a Collaborative Collections Community for the development of a shared vision and infrastructure needs; development of a community-based governance structure and project plan; identification of existing standards to support open data sharing across organizations, and creation of new ones; and development of interoperable, open source software middleware and applications based on this open standards architecture, to support the flow of data and information about disparate library collections...."